Referring to the way June's Thames river pageant was covered by the BBC, Buerk said: "The one enduring British institution was mocked by another that had shamefully lost its way.

"Out on the water, a tribute to the monarch that resonated back to the Middle Ages, rich in historical continuities, a floating salute to past glory and present fortitude. On the screen, a succession of daytime airheads preened themselves, or gossiped with even more vacuous D-list 'celebrities'. With barely an exception, they were cringingly inept.

"Nobody knew anything and nobody cared. The main presenter couldn't even work out what to call the Queen.

"The Dunkirk Little Ships, the most evocative reminders of this country's bravest hour, were ignored so that a pneumatic bird-brain from Strictly Come Dancing could talk to transvestites in Battersea Park.

"I was so ashamed of the BBC, I would have wept if I hadn't been so angry."

The corporation received more than 2,400 complaints from the public about some of its live broadcasts over the weekend, with much of the blame being directed at George Entwistle, the then head of BBC Vision who went on to become director-general.

Buerk referred to Daly as a "pneumatic bird-brain from Strictly Come Dancing

Referring to Entwistle's short-lived tenure at the top of the corporation after resigning in the light of the Jimmy Savile scandal, Buerk went on: "The worst thing was that it was deliberate - planned that way to be 'light' and 'inclusive'.

"The BBC actually congratulated itself, and the executive ultimately responsible was promptly promoted to become the most disastrous director-general in the corporation's history."

The former Nine O'Clock News presenter went on to express his disdain for the state of the country in general.

"The truth is that the summer was an illusion. We are not a united kingdom, we are not 'all in this together'," he wrote.

Buerk called George Entwistle the 'most disastrous director-general' in history

"We are more divided with each passing year and a cultural elite at odds with the values of those outside its own self-referential inner circle is probably the least of our problems as we head towards 2013.

"We were lonelier than we have ever been this year. In our atomised society, eight million people now live on their own, marriage is still in decline and we have the highest proportion of single-parent families in Europe.

"By the time they're 15, only half our children are still living with both parents. Mum's out to work, grandparents are far away; kinship is history."